The past decade has been marked by a technological revolution driven by the convergence of the data processing industry with the consumer electronics industry. This advance has been even further accelerated by the extensive consumer and business involvement in the Internet over the past several years. As a result of these changes, it seems as if virtually all aspects of human endeavor in the industrialized world require human-computer interfaces. These changes have made computer directed activities accessible to a substantial portion of the industrial world's population, which, up to a few years ago, was computer-illiterate, or, at best, computer indifferent.
However, even more significant than these advances in opening new horizons to the general population has been the ability of the computer and the Internet to rescue people with even very severe physical impairments from lives of limited menial or no productivity. With the computer, any impaired person with even slight dexterity or vision may, with sufficient effort, be capable of becoming as fully productive from his desktop as a person with full dexterity or vision.
This is possible because, unlike the workplaces of the past which presented global or universal working conditions where each worker had to adjust to thereby eliminate most physically or visually impaired people, the computer may be tailored to the unique abilities of each physically impaired individual. To this end, the computer industry is continuously seeking new implementations to bring more and more physically impaired individuals into full productivity in the workforce.
One source of frustration to physically and visually impaired computer users has been movement of the screen cursor and movable screen indicia to make the required user-interactive selections. Despite all of the great changes that have been made in the computer industry, the screen cursor controlled manually by the user still remains the primary human-computer interface. The user still commands the computer primarily through manual pointing devices such as mice, joysticks and trackballs that control the on-screen cursor movements. It must be noted that the principles involved in such pointing devices were developed over a generation ago when most of the people involved in interfaces to computers were computer professionals who were willing to invest great amounts of time in developing computer skills. It is very possible that had computers originally been the mass consumer, business and industry implements which they are today, user interfaces which were much easier and required less skill to use would have been originally sought and developed. Nonetheless, the manually controlled cursor movement devices remain our primary implement for cursor control. The present invention is directed to making mouse, trackball and like cursor control devices more user friendly and effective for the physically and visually impaired.
Cursor control devices, such as the mouse, translate relatively precise orthogonal manual movements into precise cursor movements on the display screen. Users with poor hand-eye coordination due to poor eyesight, physical impairment, feebleness or other dexterity problems find the computer mouse to be quite stressful and frustrating.
The above-referenced copending application is directed to interactive computer controlled display systems and particularly to methods in such systems for making the cursor easier to use and control in making on-screen movements and selections of displayed objects such as icons. The copending application provides alternate access for physically impaired users to items normally displayed in drop down menus through a hierarchical tree arrangement of selectable items corresponding to items in said set of menus. The selectable items in the tree are icons and, particularly, icons varied in size so as to be optimized to diminish the effects of the individual user's impairment. For the same effect, the icons in the tree may also be varied in distance, i.e. spaced from each other so as to be optimized to diminish the effects of the individual user's impairment.